This blind girl opened the UNs eyes to problems faced by Indian women.

Ask Swarnalakshmi Ravi about any administrative term and she will reel it out as if it was right there at the tip of her tongue. A visually impaired girl, who has made her way to the UN assembly twice in the same year, she has big plans for the country’s education system.

The Political Science student from Chennai dreams of developing an inclusive education system in the true sense of the word ‘inclusive’ where everyone is given an equal opportunity. “All my life, I have been treated as a ‘special’ student. I went to a special school, had special teachers and expected to have friends of my own special kind. There was so much ‘special’ that it made me feel excluded. I want to remove that,” she says. It was the Children’s Parliament, which gave Swarnalakshmi the necessary confidence and the realisation that she was no less than other students.

“I’m a self-conscious person so I wondered if I could be perfect at this or not. My mother always told me that if you go into a mission you should be perfect for it and I did not want to let her down. One day, I told myself I had to do this,” she says. Turns out, she was perfect for the position. She was selected as the Finance Minister of the Parliament.

Merely a month into her selection and she was on the streets heading relief work after a cyclone hit Tamil Nadu in 2014. From collecting funds and allotting it to families hit by the disaster, Swarnalakshmi really came into her own. Her next step was something that would make anyone nervous — giving a speech at the UN. But Swarnima, as her mother fondly calls her, was ready and confident.

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“Our Parliament provided a good platform to speak and overcome my fears. The only difference I felt was that there was a sense of responsibility. I felt that people needed me to speak about their problems,” she says.  Since then, she has visited the UN twice. Once she was highlighting the violence against women and the second time she was speaking for developing the education system of the country.

Drawing from her own experiences, she thinks that schools and colleges in India are simply not equipped to accommodate students with special needs. “After finishing X standard in a special school that was 30 km away from my home, I wished to enter a regular school. Everyone denied me admission in spite of having good marks only because they did not have any proper facilities or trained special teachers,” she recalls. But that will not deter her. Back in Chennai and oozing with confidence, Swarnima aspires to crack Civil Services and ensure that every school and college has the facilities needed to give specially abled students education.